Dead of Night Read online

  “They’ve arrested Dow?”

  Evidently she’d been where she heard all I said, assumed that I meant I’d been with Lanerd, instead of at his home.

  “You realize,” I made it sound exasperated, “half the cops in New York are hunting for you?” It might have been true by that time, for all I knew. “How long’d you think you could get away with this hide-and-seek?”

  Nikky glared ferociously; two little white spots showed at her nostrils; I remembered what Lanerd had said about her temperament.

  Tildy gripped my arm more tightly. “I did not know about Dow.”

  “You knew about the dead man in your closet!” I had to shock her to get her to do what I wanted, but I didn’t dare carry it too far. Nikky was getting madder by the minute. “You knew someone would be arrested for Roffis’s death. So what’d you do! You ran out, leaving someone else—”

  “No, no, no!” Tildy shook me, to emphasize her denial. “I was afraid. I knew there was a fight. But I did not know Roffis had been killed. No.”

  “You weren’t in any doubt about there having been a fight!” I had to concentrate on Tildy. But out of the corner of my eye I saw the elder Narian come back into the room. “That probably someone had been hurt! But you didn’t bother to look! You didn’t tell anyone about the man who came in your bedroom!”

  “Yes,” she said tensely. “I did tell Dow!”

  “Funny he didn’t give Hacklin any description of the man.” The only way to reach her emotions was through her feeling for Lanerd, that was plain as boiled potatoes.

  She released my arm. “Perhaps I didn’t—” She pressed finger tips to her temples. “Maybe I was too vague—but, of course, then I didn’t know Roffis had actually been murdered, you see.”

  I stared with what I hoped was utter disgust. “You’re content to let it go at that?”

  “I don’t want an innocent man to suffer—for a horrible crime like that. But when this—this intruder came in my bedroom—”

  “How’d he get in?”

  “I don’t know,” she cried. “He must have had a duplicate key. He was in the bedroom when I returned to it, after dinner.”

  “You scooted right back to the living-room, asked Roffis to put him out?”

  Nikky said sharply, “No, she did not. The man said he was from headquarters. Claimed he’d come to take Miss Millett downtown. He did look like a detective, too.”

  I asked what a detective looked like.

  Tildy made expansive gestures. “Oh, tall. Big. Broad-shouldered. Heavy-set.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  They couldn’t remember. Something dark, Nikky thought. Gray, said Tildy.

  “What made you decide he wasn’t from headquarters?”

  “Mister Roffis and Mister Hacklin, both, had warned us,” Tildy answered, “to be on the lookout for anyone pretending to be a policeman. And of course I was suspicious right off because he’d sneaked in my bedroom that way, and hadn’t spoken to Roffis or anything.”

  “Yair? So you called your bodyguard. And?”

  “He ran into the bedroom. We heard an angry argument,” she glanced at Nikky for confirmation; Nikky nodded; “then the bedroom door was slammed, and we couldn’t hear anything else. But after a few minutes, I began to be frightened. I called through the closed door to Roffis, and there wasn’t any answer.”

  Nikky said, “I opened the door, and there wasn’t anybody there.”

  “At first,” Tildy went on, “we supposed Roffis had put the man out and was taking him to a police station or the District Attorney’s office.”

  Nikky added, “But when Mister Roffis didn’t come back, we were both very scared. I begged Miss Millett to call up Mister Lanerd, across the hall.” She touched Tildy’s arm, but the skater kept watching me to see how much of it I believed.

  It had more holes in it than a fish net, but I let them think I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. “If you’d only gone back to the hotel after the show and made that statement, you’d have saved a lot of headaches. You better come back and make it now, before things get balled up worse for Mister Lanerd.”

  Nikky said, “No,” flatly.

  Tildy held her right arm stiffly at her side, clenched her right fist, and pounded her thigh. “I can’t let Dow suffer any more. But—” She couldn’t decide.

  “All right. If you want to let it go at that.” I started for the door.

  “No, no.” She bit her upper lip. “Wait. Wait! I will come.”

  Nikky cried, “I’m going with you.”

  “Not in that.” The skater eyed the native costume. “Go up and change. Hurry.”

  Nikky swirled out in a flurry of silk.

  Tildy flew to Golub Narian, put her arms around him, touched her cheek to his. “You will understand, dear friend. It’s better I go by myself. I will be back for Nikky later. Tell her I will be all right.”

  She turned to me. “Quickly, before she comes down.”

  We went out hastily. I helped her into my car, kicked the starter.

  There was a red at the Atlantic Avenue corner. I slowed to try and make it without stopping.

  The taxi rolled up alongside with its bumper about at my front hub cap when the first shot shattered the windshield halfway between my head and Tildy’s.

  Chapter Twenty: A SPRAY OF BULLETS

  MY REFLEXES MADE ME BEND over the wheel, jam the accelerator to the floor, swing the car to the left to bump him; it happened too fast for me to reason out the best thing to do.

  The shots kept coming. Sparks reflected in the spiderweb of the shattered glass. Staccato explosions like backfiring. A pinggg as a slug ripped the door at my side. Tinkle of glass on the pavement. Tildy screaming. And the terrific crash as my fender collided with him.

  I must have been getting up to forty when we hit. It didn’t slow me, but it jounced the wheel so I had to wrench hard to keep from climbing the opposite curb. Tires screeched. The taxi’s headlights swerved left. The cab socked a hydrant with a smash like an ash can full of bottles being dropped from the second story.

  I managed to straighten out, zoom around the Atlantic Avenue corner without slowing. There was a subway kiosk at the next corner but I kept revving it up until we’d covered nine more blocks to the next station.

  It wasn’t safe to drive any more than I had to. The windshield couldn’t have had more cracks in it if a sledge hammer had worked on it. I couldn’t tell whether intentionally or otherwise the guy with the gun had drilled a tire or my gas tank. Besides, the three bullet holes in my windshield couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else by a traffic cop; we couldn’t have driven much farther without meeting one. I was allergic to blue broadcloth right then.

  I braked, slewed in behind a parked florist’s truck. The streets were swarming, shirtsleeved men standing around open-front candy stores, old women sitting in darkened doorways, couples jitterbugging on the sidewalk to music from an orchestra in a second-floor dance hall.

  Tildy was still crouched, low on the seat, twisted around so she could look out through the jagged glass of the rear window. There weren’t any taxis coming up the avenue behind us; from the sound of that smashup I thought that particular cab wouldn’t be in shape to drive for a while.

  She didn’t seem as much frightened as stunned when I helped her out, made some banal crack about “the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be” for the benefit of bystanders who were showing curiosity about our windshield. The only thing she said, as I led her down the subway steps, was, “He was trying to kill me.” I couldn’t deny that!

  Psychology sharps use a trick to impress their pupils with the difficulty of observing and remembering an unexpected incident of violence. In the middle of a lecture two students will suddenly stand up, engage in a fierce fisticuff. A third stooge attempts to interfere, gets knocked down for his pains. A girl finally separates the contestants. The prof then asks one and all to put down on paper their recollection of what went on. He usuall
y gets as many variations of the facts as there are students in the class. So I didn’t expect to get much help from Tildy’s description of what had happened. I was in error.

  “When that guy in the cab started blasting, I was so busy handling the car I didn’t get a look in my rearview,” I told her while we walked up to the end of the platform to avoid the crowd. “You see him?”

  “It was the same man.” A tiny sliver of glass had stuck to her cheek; she removed it, held it on her finder tip in fascination. “The one who came to the hotel.”

  “Not the guy who shot Johnny the Grocer?”

  “No, no. The one who—who must have killed Herb Roffis.”

  I was fed up with all that hodelyo; probably a delayed take from those near misses and the damage to a good Buick. “Godsake, give me something to go on,” I said crossly. “Mustache? Beard? Fan ears? Pug nose? Was he dark? Or light?”

  She leaned close; the Manhattan-bound train thundered in; it was hard to hear anything. “Florid, I should call him. Yes. A red face. No mustache.”

  We slid into the first car, sat up close to the motorman’s compartment. There were only four other people in the car; the only one who paid any particular attention to us was a skinny girl with mean, narrow-set eyes. She nudged the older woman at her side; they whispered with much animation, craning their necks to get a better view of Tildy.

  “How old would you say this bird was?” I kept after her. “Twenty? Forty?”

  “In between. Say, thirty-four or five.” Tildy looked as if she might be sick to her stomach.

  It took until we got to the Manhattan side to get the description. What it summed up to—the man she described could easy be arrested if the cops were looking for Roy Yaker. Or vice versa.

  That gave me pause.

  When Tildy asked if we were going straight to the hotel, I said, “We were. But I don’t believe that’s very smart, now. This boy with the lethal notions will expect us to do that. He may be there before we are.”

  “I am so horribly afraid.” She showed it plainly. “For myself—for Dow. And—for you.”

  “Fellow wasn’t after me.” I wasn’t as confident about that as I may have sounded; she hadn’t been in the car with me on the way in from Dave’s Place, but I’d been trailed just the same.

  The skinny girl swayed up the aisle, bent over, eyes fixed on Tildy. “Pardon me, but aren’t you Tildy Millett?”

  There were half a dozen others in the car by then; every head was turned our way.

  Tildy smiled, shook her head in mock amusement. “I suppose you’re the thousandth person to ask me that.” She leaned close to me, smiled at me. “I guess she doesn’t ride in subways much, does she?”

  The girl fumbled with “excuse me’s” and “the resemblance is astonishing,” went back to her companion.

  I got Tildy off at the next stop, Thirty-Fourth Street. There was a drugstore on the corner. I shooed her in, went to a phone booth, called the hotel.

  Mona answered, “Law, Mister V. How long can you be paged! Tim is going out of his mind—”

  “A short trip and a merry one. Let me talk to him.”

  “Holy Mother, Mister Vine!” When Tim “Misters” me, there is something very nokay and usually someone else in the office with him. “How quick can you get over here?”

  “Whatsit, Timothy?”

  “We—uh—got another one of those things upstairs.”

  “Another what? A killing?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to say too much, Mister Vine, because I think prob’ly our beer is bein’ tapped, but it’s Mister L.”

  Chapter Twenty-One: FLIGHT FROM DANGER

  THAT WAS A BAD FEW MINUTES, in that booth.

  Even at one-thirty ayem, a flock of nighthawks were flitting in and out of the drugstore, looking for pickups—or pick-me-ups.

  I realized how helpless a guy in a phone booth could be if a killer cornered him there. There’d be nothing to do but take it, even if a man had a gun. No room to aim. No shelter to dive beneath. I kept my eyes peeled for cream-colored suits, for weasel-faces like the one on that police flyer, for ruddy-cheeked individuals—while I extracted what I could from Tim.

  Dow Lanerd was dead. Bullet in his brain. Found in the bathroom of his suite about an hour before by special Prosecutor’s assistants seeking to get Lanerd’s fingerprints for comparison with the bloody marks on Tildy’s bedroom door. Tim couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say whether they’d chalked it for murder or suicide. He confined his replies to “Yuh” and “Uh, uh.” Clearly a plain-clothes man was in my office, listening to what Tim said. That’s what he’d meant to warn me about when he’d suggested my phone line was tapped.

  I cut it short, told him I’d be in soon’s possible, said nothing about Tildy. It didn’t seem as if she could have had anything to do with Lanerd’s death. Ha!

  I didn’t know what to do with her. Hacklin wouldn’t have let her stay in 21MM. Anywhere around the Plaza Royale she’d be taking a big risk. After this third death in the case, not to mention the thin margin by which those slugs had missed us on Atlantic Avenue, I needed no more convincing that she was in extreme danger. Even hanging around in that drugstore was plenty perilous.

  I made a quick purchase, whisked Tildy out to the taxi rank on the opposite corner. The driver was half asleep, cap over eyes; he didn’t have an undershot jaw or look as if he’d mashed his nose against the steering wheel in a collision with a hydrant.

  It seemed brutal to break it to her cold. I tried to work up to it, step by step. “Remember Auguste, your room-service captain? They arrested him for Roffis’s murder.”

  It took her mind off her own troubles for a minute. “That’s ridiculous! Why would they? He’s so gracious!”

  “Idea seemed to be he’d stolen a diamond-crusted compact from you, Roffis caught him with the goods.”

  “But I gave it to Auguste. It was a present.”

  “That’s what he said. They didn’t believe him. It’s quite a bauble to get for pourboire.”

  “Yes, it’s valuable. I hope he can sell it for something. I told him so. Once,” she gazed sadly out at the Times Square turmoil, “it had also a sentimental value for me. But no more—no more.” She sighed. “Since I did not wish to use it, I couldn’t bear to see it around. I gave it to Auguste gladly.”

  “Fixes Auguste on that score. They’ll still hold him for murder.”

  “They mustn’t, they mustn’t. I’m positive he didn’t do it, absolutely positive.” She accepted the peasant kerchief I’d bought at the drugstore counter, began to fold it to arrange over her head. It wouldn’t be as effective a disguise as that theatrical wig, but it made her less conspicuous.

  “Being positive doesn’t salt any celery. Mrs. Lanerd was positive you stabbed Roffis.”

  “She would be. She hates me for taking Dow away from her.” Tildy held her head very high; I think she was crying but she wasn’t noisy about it. “She doesn’t need to worry. All that is—over.”

  “Jeff MacGregory was reasonably positive, too, about your having killed your bodyguard. Because of something you said at the studio tonight, to the effect you had to do it, you couldn’t give him up. He thought you were referring to Roffis.”

  “Oh! No!” She clasped her hands pathetically. “I did not. I never did.”

  “You meant Lanerd?”

  She made a little strangling noise in her throat; her shoulders shook.

  “If that’s what was in your mind, you’ll have some explaining to do, now Lanerd’s dead.”

  For the time it took our cab to go half a block I thought she hadn’t heard me.

  Then she whispered, “Dow? Not Dow!”

  I nodded.

  Barely audible: “I don’t believe it.”

  “He’s at the hotel. I suppose they’ll let you see him.” I tried to make it matter-of-fact.

  She whimpered as if I’d struck her. “You’re being cruel. To frighten me.”

  “Frighten you? Aft
er what happened on Atlantic Avenue?”

  “It is true then? Honestly?” For a bit she couldn’t seem to understand. When she spoke again her tongue was blurred as if she was tight. “Do they know—have they any idea—who did it?”

  “Not yet. Might have been suicide.”

  “You couldn’t say that if you’d known him. No one ever was fonder of life than Dow.” If I hadn’t been watching her, I’d have thought she’d taken a long pull from a secret flask; she began to weave back and forth on the seat, drunkenly. “Was that—that same—horrible person.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Get hold of yourself; we’ll be at the hotel in a few minutes.”

  “Driver,” she slurred it so it sounded like “Drier.” “Stop this cab! At once! Let me out!”

  The driver slowed, looked over his shoulder, scowled at me, pulled in toward the curb.

  “Go on,” I said quietly. “The lady’s a little upset. She’ll be all right, soon’s—”

  She flung the door open. The cab was still moving. She stumbled out, collapsed on the curb.

  The driver braked the car with a jerk, swearing under his breath. “Want I should call a cop to handle this, miss?”

  “Shut up.” I poked a bill over the window ledge at him. “She’s all right.”

  Tildy lurched to her feet, started down the street, half running, head down, bumping blindly into passers-by.

  As I went after her the driver’s scorn followed me. “… ashamed yaself, gettin’ a nice goil like that plastered…”

  “Tildy!” I caught her, held her. “Snap out of it.”

  “My fault,” she whimpered. “All on—’count of me.” She leaned weakly against a store window. “He’d be alive this minute if I hadn’t been a rotten coward.”

  “Don’t you start blaming yourself. There’ll be plenty of others doing that. Let’s get off the street, back to the hotel, huh?”